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Americans who believe America’s always wrong are all but fainting this week. More evidence emerged, in the form of a leaked Justice Department white paper on targeted killings, that their president doesn’t share the belief that Islamist terrorists deserve all the rights and protections accorded American citizens, as well as catered halal diets, ObamaCare and Social Security benefits.

Let’s get one thing straight: The right of a state and its people to self-defense trumps every other aspect of international law, treaties and practices. The foundation of the moral legitimacy of the state is its role in protecting its citizens from violence, foreign or domestic. All else is secondary.

When attacked, we may do whatever it takes to defend ourselves. We have been attacked, repeatedly, by Islamist terrorists. And the fellow believers of those who attacked us publicly, regularly and venomously announce that they intend to attack us again.

It’s not only our government’s right, but its duty, to kill them before they harm us.

What about about the thug-huggers’ concerns? Dissect the issues, one by one:

Kill, don’t capture. We owe America’s lefties a big wet kiss for forcing the Obama administration into this highly effective policy. By making a cause celebre out of the imaginary suffering of blood-drenched terrorists at Gitmo, they inspired candidate Obama to promise to close the facility within the first year of his presidency.

But no can do. Gitmo’s still open — and not just because Congress wouldn’t let him close it. Our legal system benefits terrorists; they’re briefed on how to beat our laws. So President Obama & Co. figured out fast that captured terrorists are another “unfunded liability.” In office, Obama also learned that the terrorists aren’t kidding. The obvious answer? Just kill ’em.

Thank you, left-wing champions of injustice!

But killing terrorists only makes them martyrs. Hogwash. The opposite’s true. Imprison a terrorist and you will, indeed, make him a martyr. Kill him, and he’s dead.

Nobody’s attacking us in the name of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi these days (remember the Butcher of Baghdad?). And when terrorists seized a remote natural-gas facility in Algeria last month, they weren’t yelling, “Remember Osama bin Laden!”

Instead, they demanded the release of the “Blind Sheik,” the mastermind of the first Twin Towers attack, from a US prison. Misplaced mercy inspires more attacks.

But killing terrorists deprives us of intelligence. As a former intel officer, I have some theoretical sympathy with this point. But given our hopelessly prissy rules for interrogation today, there would be zero value in taking even top terrorists prisoner. (Obama didn’t even try to capture Osama.) They follow our politics and policies. They know that a CIA interrogator can’t lay a glove on them without going to jail.

By insisting that we had to treat captured terrorists like prep-school kids caught in a food fight, leftists forced Obama to send in the drones. The result is that “core al Qaeda” has been rendered ineffectual.

But no president should murder American citizens. Tell it to Abe Lincoln, Hollywood’s celebrity-president of the season, who invaded the South (which had not even threatened acts of terror). The result? Perhaps 750,000 dead Americans. I believe Lincoln was our greatest president after Washington, but he wasn’t just about emancipation.

Our president has the authority to quell insurrections by force. American-born terrorists engage in insurrection. Case closed.

Consider the late Anwar al-Awlaki. Lefties argue he didn’t pose a sufficient threat to merit killing. Really? Here’s a traitor who joined our most virulent enemies and used his knowledge of our country to encourage, plan and facilitate attacks. His guilt was greater than that of some poor sap who strapped on a suicide bomb — just as crime bosses bear a heavier guilt than their trigger-men.

And if a foreign power can’t or won’t control its own territory, we have a legal right to intervene under the accepted conventions of warfare.

The same principle applies as in police work: If a criminal points a gun and won’t drop it, you shoot him. Awlaki could’ve saved his life by abjuring terrorism. Instead, he took his 16-year-old son along to make war on America.

Then we got “outrage” over the boy’s death in a drone strike. Well, daddy shouldn’t have taken the kid on jihad.

This is not a difficult issue: When Americans turn violently against the United States, they lose the benefits of citizenship. When German-Americans served in Hitler’s military in World War II, we didn’t call a pre-battle time-out so American traitors could identify themselves and lawyer up.